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Every one or two election cycles, here in Colorado, a question for education funding appears on our ballot. Sometimes, this is several million dollars to retrofit a handful of elementary schools. Other times, it will be to raise money for some slush fund which, one worries, will ultimately be used to buy iPads or do unnecessary library renovations. These proposals sometimes pass and sometimes fail — usually depending on how vague the proposal is. But for some reason, we never vote on a measure to address the primary factor in student success — the quality of our teachers.
Teaching is in a crisis nationwide. Amongst K-12 teachers, 44% leave the profession within the first five years. Why is this? One reason might be the relatively low pay. While estimates vary by source, nationally, K12 teachers make an average salary of about $65,000— less than an insurance salesperson¹. This is despite requiring both an undergraduate degree and a teaching certificate — which takes at least an extra year. In Colorado, the salaries are even lower at around $62,000². How many brilliant people are declining a career in teaching because of this — and how do we measure the loss to our students?
I’m employed in tech — a place of famously high salaries. Why do we pay so much? It’s because the impact of a good engineer is many times greater than their pay — and a poor engineer will often have a neutral or negative impact on a company. I’d propose that teachers are the same. Everyone remembers that one good teacher who inspired them to bigger things — as well as the bad teacher who killed our interest in a subject. So it’s not just important that we pay teachers enough to increase their tenure, we also have to pay them enough such that administrators have their choice of the best candidates — and can safely fire the bad ones.
It’s not enough to just allocate more money to education. Curiously, districts usually have enough young teachers to fill our classrooms at the start of every school year. Whether the candidates are any good is another question but it makes it hard to justify raising their salaries in lieu of other priorities. And that’s why we need a constitutional amendment to lock-in the salaries of good teachers. Indexing pay to the 80th percentile, in Colorado, would raise average teacher pay from $62,000 to $105,000 (a 69% increase)³. This is about the same as an electrical engineer or a data scientist — better reflecting their importance to society and driving more smart people to consider teaching as a career. We could also index this pay to age (so that a 45 year old teacher makes the 80th percentile income amongst 45 year olds). This would help to further improve teacher retention by guaranteeing regular, predictable, and fair pay increases.
With this amendment, Colorado would have the highest teacher pay in the country (by a hair). Coupled with our otherwise high quality of life, we will be able to recruit and retain the best teaching talent. Raising the next generation is the most important thing we can do as a society — and this is a smart way to do that.
¹ https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm
² https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_co.htm
³ https://dqydj.com/2021-income-percentile-by-state-calculator/
Originally written as part of Project 536 — utopian ideas in 536 words or less